aimiller's Reviews (689)

This book was an interesting narrative take on the murder and subsequent trial, as well as the political organizing around the death of Emmett Till. I felt in some ways jerked around by this book, as a white reader--Tyson ends the book with a vivid call to action, but really doesn't posit the reader alongside Carolyn Bryant, asking the reader to challenge their own inner white supremacy (assuming a white reader, which, given the call to action, is who I think Tyson is aiming for.) There are some interesting things going on with rhetoric around how white supremacy functioned at the time of Till's death, especially given the messiness of the defense's claims during the trial, and it's probably a really good read for undergraduates or other non-historian folks looking to get a touch at how white supremacy has changed over time but also remained entrenched.

So this book was..... meh but acceptable? Until the methodology section when things just spiral out of control. Goffman's writing about women is absolutely garbage, and her whole lack of examination of whiteness and what her whiteness is doing is just... borderline inexcusable, though apparently it is a disciplinary move. Her narrative writing, however, is really compelling and it's a fast read, so it's got that going for it. But the work Goffman does is just a reiteration of tropes in sociology that really leave much to be desired.

This book was really a delight. I strongly recommend getting the 25th-anniversary edition if you can find it, because my #1 favorite part was in that (a quotation from Lemon Johnson--god it was so good, ahh.) In a lot of ways, this is definitely a product of its time; it reads just like an old-school labor history book, and it can be very easy to get lost amid all the names and acronyms (and Kelley for some reason decided to just dive into those and not do like a first-reference full name thing, which was a Choice for sure) but also it's an incredible story of Black radical politics and Black folks doing what they can and organizing to survive. WITH added 'well-meaning white Communists fucking up' which is my favorite genre. Overall a great read, and a deep reminder of what I love about history.

A really great book--Hartman traces her research journey through various slave trade sites in Ghana alongside her emotional reaction to them and the constant deferral of what she emotionally wants/needs out of that trip. There's so much going on in here about space and geography, and the collapsing of time that is super interesting, and Hartman is a really excellent writer. The way she weaves some sentences leaves a lot of "oh eff" moments, and I really feel like I have to revisit this when I'm not under a time crunch to finish it for class and think a lot more about questions about ghosts and haunting for myself (I'm always thinking about ghosts and haunting.)

Anyway, I really strongly encourage folks to read this, it's a great book that provides a lot of information alongside an emotional journey that's interesting and insightful to follow.

I really enjoyed this--at first, I wasn't sure there was much here that was new, but the later chapters especially I think extend to think about marriage not just as part of accessing citizenship for Black people but also as a mechanism to control them, and that to me was new and really interesting. There are definitely portions of this that would be really great for use in undergraduate classes, and it's very well-researched and well-written!

So I will say that I think I didn't like this more because of the time pressures under which I had to read it, but I often found it hard to follow and in some ways it must have really been fundamental to the field because I wasn't entirely sure what about it was new? There were definitely parts that were important, and I think Smallwood's framework of tracing this shift from person to commodity to slave is important but to me it just sort of jumbled together a lot and I wasn't sure exactly what she was getting at at different points. Again, I think more of that has to do with the way that I experienced this book than the book itself, but that's where it left me at the end. I would like to go back some day and reread it with a bit more care, it just wasn't a possibility at this time.

This book felt like being wrapped in a blanket--it was soft, warm, and comforting, even in the hard parts, and the pacing was like being rocked in a boat. This all could be because I read it every night before bed (which is why it took me so long to finish) but I do find Erdrich's prose to be extremely comforting.

She cites the Billy Tipton biography in the back as something from which she drew the character of Father Damien (or at least makes reference to the book in talking about the plausibility of Damien's life), and given the way that book was written, I'm not super surprised to see the sort of gender nonconforming character roll out the way it did--if you (like me) are trans and aware of the critiques of the Tipton biography, you'll see a lot reflected there, but the space made for sort of the flow of gender here doesn't feel vicious? I'd love to hear a trans Two Spirit Ojibwe person's perspectives on it, because my feelings are obviously really tied up in the ways I see trans and gender nonconforming people make appearances outside of books written with Ojibwe culture in mind, but I was sometimes uneasy about the way Damien was written, and sometimes I was okay with it.

Regardless, it was a beautiful book and I'm very glad to have read it. As someone who hasn't read much else of Erdrich's stuff, particularly the other books set there, I'm interested to see how they all fit together, but I will say I don't think you need to have read those to get into these and feel warmed by it.

I really really enjoyed this- it's a really good, very accessible basic primer on organizing for people who want to do more. The examples were all clear and accessible, and I would strongly recommend it to people who read The New Jim Crow and want to do something, or for others who have hit a point in their social justice education where they are beginning to feel helpless and need to begin to do something. Sometimes its overly simplistic, but I recognize that it's intentionally so in a lot of ways.

In actuality, I might give this book 2.5 stars? But I definitely didn't really like it, and not just because I'm tired of reading about white upper class women in history (though that definitely played into how I felt about the book.)

It was also all over the place--it followed the war chronologically at first, which makes a lot of sense! But then, once the war ended, we focused on Elizabeth Keckley (who we'd been hearing about the entire time, though mostly as a way to get at what was happening with Mary Lincoln, which........... is Gross, frankly, but okay,) and went back to before the war started? And then gathering up all the Confederate women who we'd started with also borked the timeline. Which also: dealing with the Confederate women is a whole other host of issues, but needless to say there's not a whole lot of mention of white supremacy going on, and how it benefitted the lives of these women. And I get that this book is for a pop audience, but honestly that should not prevent us from being Real about White Supremacy, guys. It's very possible to engage in that kind of reading while still seeing women as whole people, and frankly it's incredibly needed in the popular market.

I will say that the little tidbits one gets--the very short stories--can be kind of amusing, and I've never seen anything about Mother Bickerdyke written in print before, so that was a good surprise, but otherwise, I think there are plenty of very accessible books that do a better job than this one in talking about women and their relationship to the Civil War.

So this book was a slower read for me, because it was my night read instead of the morning, and that meant it felt like the book took a long, long time to gather speed and get going, but truly once it got going, I was so sucked into the world and all the characters and it was an incredible book. The characters were so beautifully written, and as all the threads really started to come together, it was such a piece of art and really managed to feel like I, as a reader, had been given a gift in looking at this, and that the healing that took place over the course of the book was a gift. Definitely check this out if you enjoyed The Round House.